


A Fraud to the Core

by Slyjinks



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Deacon-centric, Gen, Identity Issues, Memory Transfer, Slavery, Synths, Torture, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:07:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28894869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/pseuds/Slyjinks
Summary: There was also a man strapped to the chair. A human, close cropped ginger hair, blue eyes, and features that would otherwise be nondescript, were it not for the black eye, or the assortment of bruises and cuts in various stages of healing. The man looked up at the synth and barked a laugh. D3-40 recognized the face immediately.He had seen it for the first time that morning, when he’d looked in the mirror.The man studied D3-40 with an amused grin. “Well,thisis going to be interesting…”
Comments: 13
Kudos: 13





	A Fraud to the Core

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Aleaiactaest,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27916342/chapters/68361190) my frequent co-conspirator, who originally gave me the concept for this fic, who acted as the world’s most wonderful rubber duck when I needed to talk through ideas, and who has been a supportive and eager reader during its development.
> 
> Fic songs: [We Are One (Mirror Split Up Into Pieces)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj-2yP1yu_8) by Project Pitchfork, [Control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwlGajiNczs) by Garbage, and [Too Many DJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ9ao8u4GMY) by Soulwax.

These days, Deacon typically had a pretty good excuse to check up on Sunshine Tidings. After all, someone had to make sure that Mercer was coming along okay. Every time he did, he made sure to stop by that old stump near the storage silo on the west. If anyone asked, he’d tell them he was enjoying the view or watching for mole rats over there or he thought he’d seen Professor Goodfeels stashing something questionable there. It was all lies, of course. If they’d wanted the truth, they wouldn’t be asking him to begin with.

He always felt a bit like someone was walking on his grave when he paid these visits. He supposed in a way, that someone would be him.

Of course, not in any remotely literal sense. He’d never be so accommodating as to leave behind enough to be buried, after all, and if he had, it’s not like he’d ever bother giving someone a serious answer as to where he’d want to be laid to rest. But it was nice up at the co-op. _She_ would have liked it there. That made it as good a place as any for _his_ memorial, such as it was.

He reached into the hollow in the ancient tree stump and checked on the condition of the sunglasses that he’d put there years before, making sure they were more or less recognizable. They were still in reasonable shape, although eventually he’d have to replace them.

He knew a bit about replacing things.

* * *

* * *

**_Years ago…_ **

The young infiltrator synth, designation D3-40, was led into the cramped interrogation chamber. There were a couple of SRB representatives in addition to the one member of Robotics that had escorted him in, and off to the side stood a remarkably bored looking Courser. Coursers, of course, typically managed to somehow appear to be both disinterested in everything going on around them while also judging everyone involved for the slightest whiff of sedition. This Courser looked bored and vaguely irritated, which was… close? 

There was also a man strapped to the chair. A human, close cropped ginger hair, blue eyes, and features that would otherwise be nondescript, were it not for the black eye, or the assortment of bruises and cuts in various stages of healing. The man looked up at the synth and barked a laugh. D3-40 recognized the face immediately.

He had seen it for the first time that morning, when he’d looked in the mirror.

The man studied D3-40 with an amused grin. “Well, _this_ is going to be interesting…”

* * *

D3-40 did as he was instructed. He watched the interrogation. He listened. He studied. He tried to learn all he could about the subject, his behavior, his vocal tics… everything he’d need to _become_ that man. The SRB methods were… harsh. D3-40 had heard about the use of such brutal… questioning methods used against malfunctioning synths, particularly after a retrieval. He’d never seen them used, and it had been hard to watch. At one point, one of the interrogators smashed a hammer against his left forearm with enough force that bone broke through the surface of his skin, and D3-40 had jumped and started to instinctively look away. Then he caught himself. He was there to watch. Looking away was disobedience. Disobedience was malfunction, and malfunction would mean him in that chair and not just the man whose face he wore.

He didn’t think any of the humans had noticed the lapse, but he was worried that the Courser might have noticed.

Afterwards, the man’s arm was set back in place and a stimpack was injected into him, to help him heal faster for the next round.

There was a break in the tortu- the questioning. Those doing the interrogation insisted that there needed to be breaks in order for the methods to remain effective. The Courser had made a face when they’d said that, but hadn’t said anything. Now the SRB representatives and the Robotics scientist had moved into an adjacent room to discuss something. D3-40 was pretty certain he’d spotted Zimmer through the open door while they’d been leaving. This was clearly a high profile mission.

D3-40 and the Courser, an imposing early model designated A3-21, had been left in the room. D3-40 had been left in there to allow him more time to study the captive, who was not smiling anymore. A3-21 had been left in there so he could watch them both.

D3-40 tried to keep his focus on the captive, but he found himself getting nervous under A3-21’s steady gaze. At one point, D3-40 had dared to glance up at the Courser for a moment, and the expression gave him pause. A3 had looked… sympathetic? Pitying?

It was probably D3-40’s imagination.

But then the Courser spoke. “You should probably know, you’re being set up for failure.”

D3-40 tilted his head and gave A3-21 a confused look. He wanted to ask for clarification, but he was afraid to.

A3-21 clarified anyway. “Not intentionally.” He paused and shrugged, then nodded towards the human captive. “Well, maybe intentionally by him. But the, uh… traditional methods aren’t really as effective as everyone makes them out to be. You can’t trust anything you’re learning through torture, especially not without extra sources.”

There was a brief flicker across the captive’s expression, and his eyebrows lifted slightly for a moment. For just an instant, it looked like he might be ready to say something, but then that moment passed.

“I’m… certain that they’re using the methods they believe most effective,” D3-40 said carefully. Now there _was_ another snort of amusement from the captive in the chair.

“Oh, of course,” A3-21 replied, his voice giving away on the faintest bit of exasperation. “I’m sure they _believe_ those methods are effective. It’s in all our training, and it would be pretty _presumptuous_ of a retrieval unit like me to suggest that maybe the training needs updating, wouldn’t it?”

D3-40 stared at the Courser for a long moment, then hesitantly answered, “... Yes?”

The captive actually laughed at that.

* * *

D3-40 spent another few days in the room as the captive was questioned. Tortured. D3-40 supposed that if even the Courser had been willing to admit that it was torture, D3-40 could admit it, too. After each session, he would practice imitating the captive’s mannerisms and speech patterns, and then he would return to the Robotics division for… adjustments. He couldn’t remember what happened during the adjustments, but when he came to again he found the imitations easier, more instinctive. Still, it was slow going, and he could tell that Zimmer and Ayo were getting impatient with the progress, and apparently someone _besides_ the “retrieval unit” had started raising concerns of the accuracy of their acquired intel. The captive wasn’t particularly noted for his honesty.

Zimmer and Ayo were considering a different approach. They’d even brought in Doctor Volkert from BioSciences. D3-40 sat by a terminal reviewing the intel gathered through the interrogations while the scientists discussed their idea. Volkert was explaining, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. The scanners are old technology - pre war, in fact - but reliable, and I believe Robotics were eventually able to work out the bugs in the imprinting…” Volkert trailed off and glanced towards Doctor Galton.

Galton nodded. “It works. The prototype wasn’t deemed a priority for reclamation,” and here Galton gave Zimmer an accusing look, “but the Gen 3 components were built from some of that same technology.”

Zimmer narrowed his eyes and primly explained, “That prototype was made from obsolete technology.” He sniffed. “It wouldn’t be worth the resources to use one of our newer androids to bring back one of those old buckets of bolts, never mind the time wasted. It was fine as a _test bed_ , but the Gen 2s are little more than children’s toys compared with the newest models.”

Galton made a small noise of disgust, but didn’t press the matter. Instead, he declared, “Look, if BioSciences can get the scanner working, we can definitely get it imprinted. Those thieves won’t be able to tell the difference.”

* * *

It was time for another adjustment, another… recalibration. D3-40 had been told that this would be his last. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Although he was fairly certain he could do a passable imitation of the captive for a short period of time, he didn’t feel ready to take the other man’s place in the outside world. Doctor Galton himself assured him that he’d be perfect.

“If you ask me, we’re overdue for this. I’ve been trying to talk Father into this for years, but he keeps holding that Diamond City incident over my head,” Galton explained sourly. “We already know the tech works. Why bother with all these ridiculous interrogations and field observations and whatever when all we need to do is hook the subject up to a scanner and we get everything we need? It’s ludicrous.”

D3-40 wasn’t completely certain what Galton was talking about, but he had gathered that they were about to do something to him that had only previously been done to some sort of Generation Two variant. The prospect frightened him, but he could only admit that to himself. If he admitted it to anyone else, they’d assume it was a malfunction, and so he walked in silence.

They arrived in the Robotics division, and D3-40 was led to the “chair” that the personnel had been using for his other adjustments, the one that always had looked entirely too much like the reclamation chair for his comfort. He watched as two technicians made some final adjustments, and he thought he could see one or two new components that had been attached. Finally, one of the technicians looked up at Galton and said, “It’s ready, sir.”

The chair was ready. Nobody cared if D3-40 was ready. _That_ didn’t matter.

The synth was hooked up to the device, and D3-40 closed his eyes.

* * *

Deacon opened his eyes.

He was in the synth medical bay of the Institute, cramped and uncomfortable, without niceties like privacy curtains. He tried to get up, and disoriented, he fell off the medical berth. He hit the floor and remembered that he wasn’t Deacon.

He felt like his head would explode, that his skull was a thin shell ready to burst from someone else’s memories, their thoughts, their whole life. It was far too much to take in at once, and he tried to shut it out, tried to remember who and what he was. In his mind, he instinctively reached for a name, but the one that came to him wasn’t his designation, and it came with the thought, _No, he’s dead. ‘Deacon’ is the only name that matters now._

But he wasn’t Deacon. He was a synth. He was an infiltrator. He was supposed to _replace_ Deacon, to use his new position to find out all their safehouses, all their routes, to find out how they were smuggling Institute property…

D3-40’s eyes widened as a realization hit him, one that was entirely new and at the same time felt like something he’d known for years.

Synths _were_ people.

 _He_ was a person. 

Immediately after was the feeling that maybe he didn’t deserve to be treated as a person. That feeling came from Deacon, too, and he had to remind himself that he hadn’t actually done any of the things that Deacon was serving penance for. But then, if he had gone out to do his infiltration mission in the traditional way, how many synths would have had their newfound freedom cut short? How many Railroad agents would have died in a new round of safehouse raids? That seemed sin enough.

So maybe he was a terrible person, but he was probably still a person.

D3-40 pushed himself to his feet and stumbled over to the nearest sink to splash some water into his face. He looked up at the mirror, met his own eyes -

__

> _\- Deacon looked up as the synth wearing his face was led in and he barked a laugh. He bit back the urge to say, ‘Seriously? You actually bothered to copy **this** face?’ Even a minor sarcastic remark like that would reveal too much, but really, if he was missing for much longer, the others would be more confused if he **didn’t** come back with a new look. He studied the synth even as the synth studied him and couldn’t help an amused grim. “Well, _this _is going to be interesting…”_

D3-40 shook his head, pulling himself back into the moment, away from the memories of the pain and torture and questioning and the lies, oh so many lies, lies told in the full knowledge that his captors’ ability to cross reference what they were told was extremely limited. 

But he also knew the truth. He didn’t know _everything_ , but the Railroad wasn’t nearly as compartmentalized as he’d prefer. He knew enough to wreck it. He knew where Headquarters was. He knew so many safehouses and routes and…

He swallowed a hysterical giggle. They knew they had a Railroad agent. They hadn’t known just how pivotal the Railroad agent they had was. They were going to send him out to gather intel on the Railroad, when what was already in his head was probably enough to destroy them.

He stared into the mirror, into the face he hadn’t had for long, and he wouldn’t be keeping for much longer. He had to get himself out of there. He had to get both of himselves out of there, and he had to destroy that recorded scan.

* * *

D3-40, who was definitely not Deacon, walked with greater confidence than he had in his life, a clipboard held in one hand and a pen in the other. He walked like it would be absolutely laughable to question whether he should be going where he was going, and it worked. Nobody questioned. Part of him marveled that it worked so well. Part of him had already known that it would.

Nobody questioned when he walked into the Robotics division towards the chair that looked uncomfortably like one of the reclamation chairs, and nobody paid enough attention to see him pocket the holotape. Nobody looked up when he entered the section of SRB where the captive was being held. They had gotten used to seeing him there, and he clearly knew what he was doing and where he was going. They didn’t notice when one of the key-cards went missing.

D3-40 hesitated outside the cell for just a moment, looking at the beaten, bruised, and broken version of his own body, at the blood on the floor, at the eye swollen closed, and he thought, _Whelp. This is my life now._

He unlocked the cell and knelt down to help Deacon up. “You’re not going to trust me, but it’s not like you can really afford to pass on this chance.”

Deacon raised an eyebrow and smirked faintly. “Oh, I don’t know, I was starting to really enjoy my little vacation. You’ve got no idea how hard it’s been on the outside.”

D3-40 smirked back, and agreed, “Oh, sure. I mean, the food paste is terrible, but at least you don’t have to worry about any rad storms.”

Now Deacon raised both his eyebrows, perhaps a little taken aback by how closely D3-40’s expression, voice, and cadence had matched his own, but he didn’t have time to argue. D3-40 had been right about one thing: Deacon really couldn’t afford to pass on that chance.

Getting out had been more of a challenge than getting in, although a quick story told in complete confidence about a second session with the prisoner had been surprisingly ( _not surprisingly_ ) effective. He had figured out an indirect route to the Relay. He hoped that Deacon would be able to remember the Relay, because he knew he wouldn’t, he knew from _Deacon’s_ memories that synths could never recall the way back into the Institute. But Deacon was in and out of lucidity due to his injuries, and they didn’t have time to stop and take notes. Getting both of them out was a higher priority than remembering the way back in.

They were almost there when he turned a corner and almost ran smack into a Courser. D3-40’s eyes darted about the room, immediately deciding that his only option was to run and hope like hell he could make it to the Relay before the Courser could grab him. Then, to his shock, A3-21 just rolled his eyes and stepped out of the way. D3-40 gawked at him, but A3-21 just declared, “I’m on break,” and kept walking.

D3-40 and Deacon, who was having a lucid moment, looked at each other. “Coursers take breaks?” Deacon asked.

“We don’t ask Coursers questions,” D3-40 answered, “and we definitely don’t ask Coursers on break questions.”

“Can’t argue there,” Deacon agreed.

* * *

There were Railroad safehouses, and then there were Deacon safehouses, and D3-40 may not have known where every Railroad safehouse was, but he knew where every one of Deacon’s personal hideaways were. He knew that that had to be driving Deacon nuts and knew that Deacon would be setting up a few new personal shelters as soon as he was well enough to do so. That was fine. D3-40 intended to do the same. He vaguely wondered if they would run into each other, trying to lay claim to the same bolthole.

D3-40 used one of Deacon’s more obscure spots and laid Deacon in the ragged cot. He checked the other’s wounds, replacing the bandages as necessary. Then he dug into the preserved food stores and purified water that Deacon had kept stashed there and set them next to the cot. Finally, he opened a chest of clothing and pulled out a set of Deacon’s spare sunglasses.

Behind him, Deacon cleared his throat. “Excuse me.”

D3-40 slid the sunglasses in place and suddenly felt as if he’d spent his whole life naked right up until that point. He turned around and grinned. “So you’re coherent again.”

“And _you’re_ wearing my glasses,” Deacon answered.

D3-40’s grin turned into a smirk. “Mine now, but don’t worry,” he pointed at Deacon, a gesture that his memories called ‘fingergun’, “I’ll pick you up another pair next time I’m out for supplies. _You’ve_ gotta take it easy.”

“You’d better. I’d sooner run around without my clothes than without my shades,” Deacon grumbled. “But that’s just the immediate problem. We’ve got a bigger one. You’re an infiltrator synth, you look like me, _and_ you seem to think like me. That’s three strikes, which, if I’m remembering right, is pretty bad.” 

“Maybe, but on the up side, I also think like you,” replied D3-40.

“Yeah, there is that,” allowed Deacon. “You’re a horrible liability… but if you’re as good a copy as you seem to be, you’re potentially a tremendous asset.”

“I’m definitely a much better copy than they intended to make,” admitted D3-40.

“That’s the impression I’m getting,” replied Deacon. He looked over his duplicate and shook his head. “Wow, they must have really messed you up pretty good to get you this close.”

D3-40 chuckled. “Hey, it wasn’t so bad, as long as you don’t count the confusion, the trauma, the guilt…”

“Hey, that’s my guilt,” warned Deacon. “I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself. Or better yet, myself, but I suppose it’s too late for that.”

D3-40 nodded, then thought for a moment. He sighed. “You’re right that I’m a liability. I’ve got a recall code, and while I’m pretty sure I managed to delete that when I was grabbing the tape…” He looked up at Deacon. “I don’t suppose the Railroad has access to anything like… well, like what the Institute uses for resets?”

“What, like mem-wipes?” asked Deacon, and then he shook his head. “Naw, not really.” He frowned and studied the synth. “What, you’re saying you’d do that if I told you to?”

D3-40 asked, “What, you wouldn’t be tempted?”

“Not at all,” Deacon replied, and D3 knew he was lying. He’d be tempted, he just wouldn’t go through with it. D3 didn’t think he’d go through with it, either, come to think of it. Why destroy a valuable asset like that?

It was strange. For the first time in his life, he was thinking of himself as a person, but he still couldn’t stop from thinking of himself as an asset.

“I could leave the Commonwealth,” D3 offered. 

Deacon looked at D3 doubtfully. “Or you could claim you were going to leave the Commonwealth, get a new face, and join the Railroad under some other name.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” D3 lied. He had already started making plans for it.

“Forget it,” said Deacon. “I want to be able to keep tabs on you, and the easiest way to do it is… to let you keep being me.”

D3 thought about it. “People don’t really keep track of more than two or so faces in a row, do they? I bet if we both got different face swaps and just made sure never to be seen at the same place at the same time, people will just assume you’ve started going under the knife every other week.” He grinned at the thought.

Deacon also grinned. “Gotta admit, you do make that tempting. Of course, if that’s going to work, we’ll have to check in with each other regularly, make sure that if someone brings up something that happens to one of us, the other knows what was going on.”

D3 leaned against the wall and observed, “I’m sure it’s just coincidence that your plan would call for that, and has nothing to do with the fact that you were planning on keeping real close watch on what I was doing for a while, anyway.”

“Really? I hadn’t even considered that,” Deacon deadpanned. “But here’s the thing… you’re not going into Headquarters. Not for a long time. Maybe never.”

D3 nodded. It was a reasonable demand. But Deacon would also want to find a way to enforce it. Deacon knew that D3 knew where HQ was, which meant that the only real way to keep him out would be to get his own permission to enter revoked. He looked at Deacon and hazarded, “You’re on thin ice with Pinky, aren’t you?”

D3 could tell that Deacon had already been thinking along the same lines. “That I am. You know, there’s this trick that I was thinking about with some theater paint, maybe a rotten animal corpse…”

“The ghoul disguise idea?” D3 asked, and Deacon smiled and nodded. 

“Right. When you’re scrounging for supplies, keep an eye out, will you?” 

“Don’t worry! I’ll have this place absolutely reeking of decaying brahmin bod in no time!” declared D3. D3, of course, had no intention of fetching any rotten animals until Deacon was in much better shape, and he certainly wasn’t bringing it into their shack, but he was pretty sure that Deacon already realized that.

* * *

* * *

**_Years passed…_ **

For a while, the Railroad had two Deacons, though no one but the original Deacon and his synth replacement knew. Sometimes there were those in the Railroad who swore up and down that it seemed like Deacon could be several places at once, and other times they’d both vanish for weeks at a time, working on their own contingency plans. More than once, both Deacons would accidentally hit on the same contingency at the same time, a side effect of how similarly they thought, but both had a paranoid streak that prompted them to come up with solutions the other _didn’t_ know about as well. 

Deacon did get himself kicked out of the headquarters, and although nobody else in the Railroad knew it, when he finally regained access, it was a different Deacon entirely.

Shortly after the human Deacon had been banned from headquarters and well before the synth Deacon had been allowed back in, rumors of a particularly high profile “package” made their rounds. A Courser, one with a particularly high retrieval rate, had come to the Railroad not as a hunter but as the hunted, asking to be taken far from the Commonwealth, and even going so far as to request a new face, a new history, a new mind. Apparently some incident in the Institute, some sort of failed experiment that the Institute had tried to sweep under their metaphorical rug, had clued him into the possibility that it could be done. The Courser didn’t give any details, and most of those in the Railroad who bothered to wonder about it at all assumed that the incident was referring to the Gen 2 detective living in Diamond City.

Neither Deacon had been particularly surprised when they’d heard about the Courser. It explained a lot.

The original Deacon had been in the Railroad for a _long_ time. It had become his life, his entire personality sublimated to what he believed the Railroad needed of him. But he was still human, and he still aged. Deacon, the synth, watched Deacon, the human, start to slow down. Even with all the surgeries, the age started to show, not so much in his face, but in his movements, his reflexes. Deacon, the synth, knew it was only a matter of time before it was Deacon, the human, who became a liability. He suspected that Deacon, the human, realized it, too.

Deacon, the synth, was still trying to figure out how to broach the subject with his human counterpart when he got word of a disastrous run that had left nearly every agent in that group dead. Thankfully, the synth himself had made it out of the Commonwealth, heading towards some small island up north, but when Deacon made contact with the safehouse that the group had been operating out of, he was greeted with surprise. 

“Deacon! I thought you were dead!”

“Not me,” Deacon, the synth, answered cheerfully. “I’m like that bad penny that always turns up!” But he knew. The other Deacon, his human counterpart, the source of his memories, his name, all that he was… that Deacon must have been on that run. 

For some time, Deacon held out hope that he’d come home, that he really would be like that bad penny. He investigated the route that he suspected that team would use, and checked all the detours he himself might have taken. He checked all their shared boltholes and meeting points, and then he checked all of his own, and any place he would have set up camp. Eventually, though, even Deacon had to admit that Deacon was dead.

Finally, the infiltrator had succeeded in replacing the original, though not in the way that the Institute had intended. Even once he became the only Deacon, and even though he’d taken up the role with the original’s blessing, the synth still felt like a fake, a fraud to the very core. He supposed he always would. After all, the original had never managed to shake that feeling, either.

Deacon set up a memorial at Sunshine Tidings Co-op, an out of the way place, one of the quiet, beautiful places that were so hard to find anymore. It was the sort of place that the original Deacon’s wife would have loved. Deacon the synth understood why. It was lush and open with a sky that went on forever, a sky unimaginable to someone who spent their whole existence in the Institute. It was the sort of place that reminded you that despite what the Institute told you, the surface was still worthwhile. There was freedom to be had beneath that sky.

The memorial wasn’t much. A pair of old sunglasses tucked away into a hollow trunk. Deacon wasn’t really sure he believed in souls. It wasn’t just that he was a synth. Years ago he had concluded that if humans had them, so did synths. He just wasn’t sure what _anyone_ had. Where was the line? But he liked to think that if spirits were things, maybe by putting the original Deacon’s memorial there, he was helping him to be a bit closer to his wife in spirit.

Not too long after, he’d helped to set up a new safehouse at Sunshine Tidings. It gave him an excuse to check on his little memorial from time to time, and he didn’t think the original Deacon would mind having another place for moving synths to freedom nearby.

* * *

Officially, Caretaker ran Mercer, but the truth was, Caretaker’s nerves were a wreck, and the man badly needed an assistant with a clearer head and calmer demeanor. Fortunately, an older gentleman who’d recently gained enough trust as a Tourist to be given access to one of the Railroad’s less central safehouses fit the bill, and he tended to most of Mercer’s day to day business so as to keep the stress on Caretaker as light as possible. 

“Heading out, Fixer?” Eidolon asked as Deacon and that Vaultie he’d taken to traveling with passed by. 

“Yeah, figured I’d check up on Sanctuary while I was in the area,” Fixer replied. Eidolon rather hoped that Fixer was lying about that. He hoped that Deacon would have taught her better opsec than to just announce her destinations publicly by now, although given the slight frown on Deacon’s expression, he guessed that Fixer still had a few things to learn.

Ah, well. That was the kid’s problem now. “Well, be careful out there,” Eidolon told them as they headed out of the main building.

Eidolon watched them go for a moment, then looked back down at his book. It wouldn’t do to let on just how carefully he conducted himself around Deacon. He always found himself tempted to watch for some sign that Deacon suspected something, especially since Deacon almost always suspected _something_ , but if it was obvious he was watching, that would just clue Deacon into the fact that there was something to suspect.

Really, the name had been the hardest part. Trying to come up with a codename that fit, but wasn’t like one he would have ever chosen for himself before? Any name that meant, “Nobody” or “Anonymous” or even “Richard Roe” were right out. John D had burned through some of those, and he was pretty sure Deacon still maintained “Officer Doe” to that day. 

But variations of Ghost and Spectre were common enough, and so he became Eidolon, and so he haunted Mercer, right by his own memorial, and took care of the Caretaker.

He had gotten too old to keep working Intel, jumping from cover to cover and identity to identity, aiding with the occasional run. Time came for everyone - well, with the possible exception of synths and robots - and it had come for him. He had started to slow down. His age was starting to show, maybe not in his face, but in his reflexes, his movements. He was starting to become a liability, and one thing he never, ever could stand to be was a liability to the Railroad.

But then a run had gone bad. They got the synth out of the Commonwealth, but most of the agents involved in the run had been killed, and he’d been left for dead. In some ways, he felt he should have died. That would have been the right way to go out. Fitting, too. Deacon dies, and nobody but Deacon knows. But no. He was able to crawl to safety, and eventually he recovered. Mostly recovered, although his left leg would never be the same.

After that incident, he’d realized that it was time to retire, or at least it was time for him to retire as Deacon. He’d shared that role, that name, that position with his synth duplicate for so many years, it should have been easy enough to just pass the torch, but when left to his own devices, the man who had been Deacon, the man who would become Eidolon, found that in his heart of hearts, he still lived for the Railroad. Maybe he couldn’t do what he had once been able to do, but he could still help in his small way. He became a Tourist, and then he became Eidolon, caretaker of Caretaker, haunt of Sunshine Tidings Co-Op, and he enjoyed the view, and he had time to read, and he kept a garden so that the synths passing through could have fresh food, and he helped in little ways, much smaller ways than before. But he knew from his time as Deacon just how much every little bit counts, and though sometimes he still felt restless, he was pleased enough to be the one who did those little bits.

Deacon died, and only Deacon knew. Deacon retired, and only Eidolon knew. The Work was still being done, not by his hands, but by hands at least as capable as his had ever been, and hands that would stay capable for much longer. It had taken the human Deacon a long time to trust his own synth replacement, and he still didn’t trust him any more than he trusted himself, which wasn’t much. But he couldn’t think of a more fitting replacement than the too-perfect copy that the Institute had made.

Deacon’s wife had been a synth. It was really only fitting that his heir should be one, too.

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned, the original concept for this fic was suggested by Aleaiactaest. She suggested the concept, we talked over the general plot, I wrote the first section, put it aside for a week or two, rewrote the first section and a paragraph of the second section, put it aside for a month or two, and then came back and wrote the rest all in one shot when I should have been doing other things.
> 
> Some of this came from playing with the idea of, “Why doesn’t the Institute use their memory scan and imprinting technology more?” We know they’ve been doing scans since before the war. We know they’ve been able to copy minds into synths since Nick Valentine. Heck, the incident with the Arts (where clearly the Institute didn’t bother to capture Art _before_ making his replacement) and the changes in behavior noticed by the Warwick family when Roger was replaced suggests that they don’t seem to be leveraging all that technology to make better replacements. The idea that we played with here was, “They don’t do that because it produced replacements that were _too_ perfect.” I always did love the whole “robot duplicate that is such a perfect duplicate that it takes on the morals of the original” trope, even if a lot of those end with the perfect robot duplicate nobly sacrificing their life for some cause important to the original. I guess our robot duplicate will just have to live for the original’s cause instead of dying for it.
> 
> Of course, not every AU would have this particular excuse as to why they don’t use that mind-writing tech more (this is not my One True Deacon Origin headcanon, just one of many), but I think it’s easy to assume that in most timelines the Institute has had some sort of similar spectacular screw-up in their past that makes them more hesitant to leverage the tech during the game time frame.


End file.
